Strict Machine

I was thinking about the new player system revealed yesterday and thought I’d write down a few ideas for Darkfall.

Goals

 
Disclaimer

A lot of balance and adjustment would be needed to make sure this system wouldn’t be abused. Consider the details below as a rough guideline of the concept, not hard rules for implementation.

Concepts

Add both stationary and patroling city guards to NPC cities.

Attack or kill a blue player in an NPC city within sight of a city guard and you’re now wanted by the guard. Assisting such a player with buffs or heals would confer the same status to the assistant. ‘Attack’ could be defined as the same conditions that would normally turn you grey.

The city guard goes after the attacker and assistants. This may involve one or more guards. The guards should be very difficult to kill.

Your options at this point are: Fight the guards, Flee, or Bribery.

If you are killed by the city guard, you have no tombstone. They take all of your inventory.

If you manage to flee the city and escape the guard, you’re now on a wanted list and considered to be an outlaw. The city guard in all of that race’s cities will attack on sight. For a higher fee than before, they could still be bribed to leave you alone and remove you from the wanted list.

Players can review the wanted list, hunt those players on it, kill them, and receive a small reward from the city guard. The balance for this component would need careful adjustment to prevent farming abuse. It might not be workable, but I like the idea of a bounty system…

The more offenses you commit without being killed by the guard or clearing your name from the list by bribing them increases your bounty. You become more of a priority to be hunted by other players as your value to them increases.

A system similar to this would offer several benefits:

I’m anxiously watching the clock today as we near the head start. I created my two preselection characters Friday and I’m ready to roll. I’m excited about the launch and really looking forward to it. Nevertheless, I’m very concerned about Aion’s potential problems.

Problems? Yes, but not with the game itself. Aion’s gameplay is smooth and doesn’t have any show stopping bugs. The NCSoft servers are running well other than perhaps a little authorization server overload headed their way. So what could be the problem? Unfortunately for NCSoft, it’s basic network configuration and routing. Yes, a triple AAA title launch and they’re still struggling with the basic network connectivity at their data center.

The networking problems began to pile up in the late closed betas. Open beta was even worse. Monitoring the routes being used for Aion traffic you could see a few experimental changes as they shifted routing preferences with their BGP peers. Some were helpful, some made it worse. This is NCSoft’s ASN and BGP peering information for the netblock that contains the Aion servers.

As for my connectivity, I’m very fortunate to have a happy ending! I’ll tell you all the details and how it was fixed after the jump!
Read more…

First, I like World of Warcraft. It’s a good game and I’ve enjoyed it now and again. Its commercial success is undeniable and so is its influence on MMO development. However, throughout this summer while beta testing MMOs, and more recently in Aion’s Open Beta, I’ve seen a disturbing trend for both in game comments and forums. It’s not a recent trend, but it appears to be more prevalent than in years past. It seems there’s a “WoW Generation” out there of players who have little tolerance for MMOs that don’t mimic WoW in a variety of ways. They cry for something new and better than WoW, yet also demand anything new conforms to parrot WoW’s features. Does this mean that every WoW player is a part of the “Wow Generation”? Of course not, but there’s enough of them out there that I think it has a negative effect for MMO creativity and commercial success.

More after the jump… Read more…